I met “Breshey” a little over a year ago and liked him instantly.

It was difficult to converse with him as it was obvious that he had a speech impediment which could have been fixed when he was a child, had it been considered an important problem.

I later found out that only a few months separated us in age. Then, after meeting him and striking up a “conversation” three weeks after, I found out, much to my surprise, that we had attended the same primary school at the same time. In my mind I wanted to know why he was as tattered as he was, doing only odd, manual labour jobs. Unable to keep it in I asked, “You and I took Common Entrance in 1962. What happened?”

“Bwoy, fi tell yu di truut, mi neva did like learning. All mi do a school a play an get inna trouble. Mi neva pass di exam an dem sen mi go “senior school”. A deh so mi really bruk out bad,” he said.

In 1962 there would have been about 2000 high school places available. It seems quite likely that it was Breshey’s speech impediment that did him in. Growing up with his poor, unexposed grandmother in Trench Town, one only had to think back to those days to recognise that poor people had other things on their minds, like eating the next day and sending the children to school, than worrying about the speech impediment of a child. At school, he would have been made fun of by his classmates and if a teacher didn’t like or sympathise with him, he would have been placed on the heap marked “chaff”.

So, decades later, we are seated in a bar with huge differences in our socio-economic situations and yet, both of us know that we started off with fairly equal chances in 1962, the year of our independence. Then just last week the bailiffs came and demolished his wood-framed house he had built on leased land.

Men like Breshey, 60 years old and now homeless, along with tens of thousands of unemployed, uneducated, hopeless young men and women, are a constant reminder that Jamaica’s problems will never and can never be solved by glitzy political promises.

STATIN data for 2009 show that 743,300 people were outside of the labour force at October last year, up from 682,900 for the corresponding period in 2008. About 431,000 of that number are in the age 14-19 group and about 80 per cent of that group have never passed a single exam or possess any marketable skills!

And yet, as a start, our formal literacy rate is given as anywhere between 86 per cent and 93 per cent! Whom are we fooling?

Digicel assisting in tackling illiteracy

The Digicel Foundation has been doing much more than one would expect from a localised corporate giant like Digicel, and at least once per week my e-mail inbox informs me that another “enrichment room” has been added to a school somewhere in Jamaica.

A few days ago I visited its website and was amazed at what the foundation was doing, especially in its push to assist in the Education Ministry’s goal of making Jamaican students 100 per cent literate by 2015. At the same time that Digicel is building resource centres, enrichment rooms and skills training centres, and stocking them with PCs, laptops and thousands of books, there are some harsh realities to face in meeting that 100 per cent literacy rate by 2015.

A few quotes from the website on 2009 and 2010 activities.

“We tried numerous in-house programmes including hiring a reading specialist and hosting literacy workshops with the schools in our cluster in order to improve significantly on our unsatisfactory literacy rate of 53 per cent,” said principal of Chapelton All-Age, Jeremiah Golding. “On writing the proposal to Digicel Foundation, we included the other schools since we are aware of their similar plight and have been working together to get the literacy and numeracy rates up. We are hoping to achieve 80 per cent literacy over the next three years by maximising the tools and strategies that the enrichment centre offers.”

“The literacy rates of the other three schools are 43 per cent, 62 per cent and 76 per cent for Pindar’s Valley, Wood Hall and John Austin All-Age schools, respectively.”

This from Mr Kelvin Clarke, president of the Good Hope Society in Dallas Castle. “Approximately 85 per cent of the youths within the community are unemployed (under age 35), so sometimes they engage in illegal activities and this has led to the serious demise of the community. Hopefully, all that will change with the opening of the new Skills Training Centre.”

In St Ann’s Bay the perennial problem is seen too. “St Ann’s Bay Primary School is located in the capital town of St Ann’s Bay and facilitates the learning of 1546 students. Operating on a shift basis, the students reside in the neighbouring communities where they experience a lifestyle dictated by low socio-economic conditions.

“MICO Care Centre conducted educational tests on referred students that revealed that at least 10 per cent of our current population has one or more learning disabilities,” explained Principal Amy James when asked of the school’s need for an enrichment room.

Regarding Victoria Town: “Last year Victoria Town Primary School closed their school year with approximately 60 per cent of the students reading at their grade level.” Principal Paul Grant indicated that there has been a consistent 30 per cent of the school who have not been able to achieve this mark. However, he is now confident that with the installation of this Enrichment Room, they can now improve their literacy level.

Said Principal Grant, “Some of our students are not able to learn under normal conditions and so we try to teach them the way they learn and not the way we teach.”

First, let us accept that our literacy rates cannot exist outside of “functional literacy”. Second, before Digicel Foundation chipped in, what had been the responses of the Education Ministry and the other large corporate bodies over the last 20 years at least? What would normally happen to, say, students at Drapers All-Age which the website says, “receives students who performed the worst in the GSAT examinations in its Grades 7-9”?

Would we just “park them”, as probably happened to Breshey in 1962, with the knowledge that when we do that, those of us with a sound education and marketable skills will have a ready stock of cheap labour to prey on many years from now?

And that presents us with Jamaica’s biggest problem – tens of thousands of undereducated, unemployed men and women, many of whom have lost all hope. They all want a taste of the pie, as well they should; but being economically unviable, they have to resort to menial work, pressuring family members, begging, or turning to violent criminality.

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